In every office, there's a person who keeps candy bowl filled

Sunday

Mar 23, 2008 at 12:01 AMMar 23, 2008 at 11:20 PM

Within the corporate structure are a few common elements in personnel. A computer wiz. A brown-noser. A walking encyclopedia. An eccentric. A know-it-all. A comic. A dictator. A pushover. A candy lady.

Deborah Allard

Within the corporate structure are a few common elements in personnel. A computer wiz. A brown-noser. A walking encyclopedia. An eccentric. A know-it-all. A comic. A dictator. A pushover.

A candy lady.

“I always have licorice. I always have jellies. Chocolate I have once a week. The pretzels are always there,” said Marion Reid, the candy lady and accounts payable clerk at Lightolier in Fall River, Mass.

“You have a little stressful day, you need a little sugar,” Reid said.

“It makes friends,” said Susan Shannon, an administrative assistant in the Instructional Learning Technologies office at Bristol Community College.

Shannon has been a longtime candy lady in her office, with the help of the “M&M man.”

She inherited a plastic yellow M&M dispenser from a former employee years ago and began filling it. Shannon found that a daily dose of candy-covered chocolate livened up the workplace and even made people open up about their troubles in the daily grind with each crank of the M&M man’s arm.

“The more stress they have, the more M&Ms,” Shannon said. “It’s kind of a joke, how many cranks.”

Sadly, the yellow M&M man “cranked his arm one too many times” last summer.

Shannon made him a sling out of paper and put the M&Ms in a bowl next to him. But it wasn’t the same.

She learned something else about providing candy to co-workers: “If they’re customers, they’re going to take care of you first,” Shannon said.

Diane Forand, a staff assistant in everything technical at BCC, is a candy lady in her own right. There, Valentine candy hearts mingle with candy canes left over from Christmas. The Easter candy is coming — when it goes on sale.